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“... conclusions of extreme generality on this sort of question, that I expect my remarks about the self to apply, if true, to human beings generally. When it comes to the sense of the self, the difference between those who can’t sleep and those who can may be more important than any cultural differences. By the ‘sense of ...”

“... fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature.’ Compound terms using ‘self-’ often raise questions about agency and responsibility. When we speak of ‘self-criticism’ or ‘...”

“... as specks in the distance & that I was alone in my distinguished detachment. Noticing, in his self-amused way, that he was behaving rather oddly, both inside the plane and when he got out, Berlin was baffled by the choices he’d made. An interest in the costs of choice-making, in the losses that every decision involved, was one of the things that ...”

“... though generally in a good’, and he was, for the greater part of his life, a great engine of self-admiration, as well as a copious begetter of admiration in other people. Yet none that loved him could easily match the love of James Boswell, who puttered along for many years, joyously, drunkenly, boisterously, earnestly, with his love of Dr Johnson both a ...”

“... of clothing funny but important, seeming trifles that can reveal serious matters about society and self: ‘mode’ in the sense of custom and process (le mode) is thoroughly entangled with ‘mode’ in the sense of fashion (la mode, a term that entered German, she tells us, in mid-century). Every ribbon signals identity; every padded this or that proclaims ...”

“... There is nothing very mysterious about the interest we take in self-destructive personalities. To be callous about it – and we are all callous when it comes to disasters relived on the printed page – their lives make excellent biographies. Not only do they suffer in a dramatic way: they do it more purposefully than the rest of us, with our dull sense of un-satisfactoriness, can manage ...”

“... brilliance on our attention, the four novelists here under review would be clustered towards the self-effacing side of the spectrum, with colleagues such as Burgess, Nabokov and Amis fils huddling together for warmth at the far end. Paul Theroux’s last novel, My Secret History, deployed a cool transparency of style to great effect in telling a story which ...”

“... developing. For Southey, it was more like a suit of armour or an exoskeleton. His gift for self-suppression was amazing, in part no doubt because he had been forced to perfect it so early. His first years were spent in the stuffy house of an aunt, a hygiene fetishist whose childcare regime consisted mostly of enforcing long periods of inaction so as to ...”

“... But if the translation is an act of love, the novel itself is an expression of hatred – German self-hatred, which, Thomas Mann said, ‘goes to the point of self-disgust and self-abomination.’ The blurb tells us that the four chief characters in the novel represent the four elements ...”

“... in your past.’ He’s also a bit of a philosopher: ‘He believed that humility was the key to self-respect and mutual respect.’ And he’s a ‘skilful and profound observer of human nature’ who ‘always tried hard to imagine how his patients felt’. He works in a hospital, where only the most difficult cases are referred to him, but also takes on ...”

“... versus not being naturally comes up, although whether the Almighty has fixed his canon against self-slaughter doesn’t seem to worry him unduly. Questions of divine intention do, however, trouble Unwin’s Mid-Victorian ancestor Matthew Pearce, whose papers have come down to him; he is supposed to be editing them. These documents are the source for the ...”

“... is ice hockey, a second home by a lake, and French spoken. The cultural life of a family may be so self-contained and self-referential that it can be transplanted into another continent and the difference will scarcely show. The five Weiss siblings, three boys and two girls, are bright, witty, full of promise. The precise ...”

“... expression and was to proclaim la politique des auteurs, he was declaring in favour of the self-effacing author. And he was himself to become the least self-effacing of film-makers. In a medium that makes things visible but keeps the director invisible behind the camera – auteur criticism was invented to bring the ...”

“... title has an archaic resonance, but also suggests we may be in for an elevated form of spiritual self-help. The main discussion is highly selective in a highly predictable way, focusing on ten or eleven poets from a 200-year historical span, all of them dead white men and long-canonised monsters of fame (Wordsworth and Hölderlin, Baudelaire and ...”

“... a Freudian point of view, Christ’s story about love was a cover story, a repression of and a self-cure for ambivalence. In Freud’s vision we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate we love, wherever we love we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us we always believe they can satisfy us. And ...”